The term “depth of field” (DOF) describes the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Control over the sharp and hazy parts of the image may be of considerable importance for the quality of a photograph. When a lens focuses on a subject at a specific distance, all subjects at that distance are sharply focused. Subjects that are not at the same distance are generally out of focus and not sharp. However, since the human eye cannot distinguish very small degrees of blurriness, some subjects that are in front of or behind the sharply focused subjects may still appear sharp. The zone of acceptable sharpness is referred to as the depth of field. Thus, increasing the depth of field increases the sharpness of an overall image.
Generally, the depth of field may depend on several factors, including the object distance, the focal distance, the f-number of the camera's lens, and on the perceptivity of the observer. Thus, in order to set the DOF that corresponds to the main object in the captured scene, the photographer is typically required to take these parameters into account and set the focal distance accordingly. Modern cameras may remove the need for manual adoption of the camera settings by using any of several complicated automatic mechanisms and processes. As result, the selected main object will not suffer from blurriness in the output image. This outcome, however, results in the blurriness of objects that are located at different distances from this main object (either farther or closer with respect to the camera).
Currently, there are no systems that can generate an output image with high DOF to match the captured scene automatically. All available systems either require manual setting of the camera to one or more determined focal distances, or can adjust the DOF to a single object in the output image using post-processing methods.
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